>Bonding With the Babe
>
>By Dave Zirin
>
>In a March column titled "Time for Selig to Bury Bonds," New York
>Daily News sports pasha Mike Lupica wrote, "They will cheer [Bonds]
>in San Francisco when he passes Babe Ruth, and we will hear again
>that his most vituperative critics hate him, the arrogant black
>star, for passing the portly white guy who has been one of the
>famous names in American sports since the '20s. As if Bonds is
>breaking some kind of record by passing Ruth. As if we care about
>that anymore."
>
>But as Bonds, now with 713 home runs, staggers on buckling knees
>toward Ruth's epic 714 total, Lupica has been proven painfully
>wrong. Even though the actual home run record is Hank Aaron's 755,
>the baseball world is on edge as Bonds approaches the Great Bambino.
[....]
>Even though Bonds has never been convicted of any crime, has never
>tested positive for a banned substance and has played the game at a
>higher level than any player of his chemically enhanced generation,
>he is the game's pariah, the media-appointed "symbol of the steroid
>era." Now that the owners have mined their billions from the 1990s
>home run binge, and everyone has a Congressional hangover, Bonds is
>persona non grata.
[...]
>[Babe} Ruth's 714 home run record lacks the spit-shined purity his
>backers trumpet. The Sultan of Swat made his bones playing against
>only a select segment of the population because of the ban on
>players whose skin color ran brown to black. Ruth never had to hit
>against Negro League greats Satchel Paige or Lefty Mathis to amass
>the magic 714. Yet no asterisk for institutionalized racism mars the
>Babe's marks. Ruth also was a habitual user of a banned substance
>that was deemed unambiguously illegal by the federal government--a
>drug Ruth believed enhanced his performance: alcohol. Ruth was a
>star during the roaring prohibition 1920s, and as teammate Joe Dugan
>said, "Babe would go day and night, broads and booze."
>
>But Ruth didn't just stop at the watering hole to find an edge.
>According to The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book, by
>Bruce Nash, Allan Zullo and Bob Smith, the Bambino fell ill one year
>attempting to inject himself with extract from a sheep's testes.
>This effort by more than a few athletes of his era to seek the
>healing and strengthening properties of testosterone prefigured the
>craze for steroids. When Ruth fell ill from his attempted
>enhancement, the media was told that Ruth merely had "a bellyache."
>This was believable since Ruth was a glutton, famed for eating
>eighteen-egg omelets. The Sultan of Swat was also a glutton for
>women and violence, and he could be roused to fisticuffs if it was
>suggested, as it often was, that he was part black. The Babe's
>famous trade-out of Boston in 1920 was justified by Sox owner Harry
>Frazee by saying that Ruth was "one of the most selfish and
>inconsiderate athletes I have ever seen."
[....]
http://www.edgeofsports.com/2006-05-09-185/index.html